About Me

I was born in march 1968 in a small village in Hertfordshire, just north of London. My father
was English (English father Irish mother) and my mother is Welsh.
When I was 2 months old the family moved to the Lebanon. I had some very good times there.
We left due to the war in a convoy that was miles long and travelled by road from Beirut to
Damascus in an 8 hour journey on the 4th of July 1976.
Since then i have lived in Croydon then various parts of Mid Sussex where I now live.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Spin is dead! Long Live Spin!

I have to say I was impressed with Gordon "bottler" Brown's promise to end spin when he came to power, and more crucially to announce to parliament before the press.

I thought it was brave.

And a hostage to fortune...

Because I knew he just could not keep to it.

And so it has come to pass. We had the Iraq announcement last week roundly rebuffed and derided in the media as it was both during another party's conference, and not to parliament as he had explicitly promised.

Well today we expect the Pre Budget Report. Well, we do now, it was going to be next week, but an election was going to be announced just afterwards, so it had to be brought forward, but Brown bottled it so could have moved it back but I digress.

This will of course be announced to parliament first, except of course that several papers have had some form of advance notice.

We have this in the FT, this in the Guardian on closing loopholes for private equity, and surprise surprise, a tax on non doms! (No I am not surprised either) whilst the Telegraph had this on Saturday about what may be in the small print on council tax going up lots to cover yet more spending on the NHS, despite the fact that Labour seem to have wasted much of what they have spent already.

There was of course a time when a Chancellor would have to resign if this sort of detail of a budget or report were leaked before hand, but not apparently in the spin free era of spin free spinning New Labour.

The Tories could now teach Labour a thing or two about spin. Half of your posting these days is anti-Labour guff coupled with gushing about how far ahead the Tories are in the polls. I am sick and tired of reading about how Labour are failing from Cameronite Tories and not what we would put in its place. I'm really torn - as a Tory activist I want a Tory government, but not under this management. There is such a thing as self-respect, and the party is never going to win an election by putting out drivel, anti-Labour spin and incoherent policy made by wonks who have never gone anywhere near the public services they claim to want to fix up.

Michael Howard is soliciting ideas on genuine public policy experiences and his email address for this is brokenbritain@yahoo.co.uk. I have been in touch with him privately and he says he is sick of all this nonsense coming out of the party which has largely disowned him in private anyway and needs people like you to help the Tories form a proper raft of policy that would actually win an election after a three-week campaign. We got halfway to government in 2005 yet we look as if we are going to slip because there is no way I or any other of my switch-voter friends would ever vote for the current crap put out by Cameron.